As technology advances, the number and variety of devices that are connected to communications network are rapidly increasing. The classification of devices connected to a network can be useful for monitoring and securing the communication network in order to prevent unauthorized or rogue devices from accessing network resources.
Some classification methodologies rely on media access control (MAC) addresses and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) user-agent strings. These methodologies are particularly limited and narrow in their classification abilities and in many cases may be unable to classify devices. These methodologies further result in frequent false negatives and false positives and thus have low accuracy.